The Grand Fatigue

Eating has once again become an important theme in life here as socialising takes a step up again. The last week ended up being fairly busy with Eikaia (conversation class) on Tuesday, an AJET meeting in Soja wit Amy, Claire, Rachel and Jaco on Thursday and Amy's hen night on Friday, a second thanksgiving on Saturday and then a cocktail and fish supper at Bob's on Saturday. Add to that the usual round of choclit and ichigo daifukus and you'll understand how I've become fat again.

The AJET meeting was fun and was the first time I've been to a JoyFull since LeeJay left Japan, and thus it was time again to marvel at the low prices and the amazing drinks bar with the radio-active cancer-giving badness of the Mellon Soda. But when a drink is that green you just cannot pass up an opportunity to pour yourself a glass...

Friday saw a much more sophisticated drinks bar as we headed to Cannery Row for Amy's hen do. We almost headed to the wrong Cannery Row. I found a phone number on the internet for Ilana who booked it and when I went to check the map to give people directions it took me a while to make the switch from, "ooh, this map's wrong" to "ooh, there're two branches and we've booked the one I didn't know about". With only one casualty from the mix-up who arrived 15 minutes late we were on course for a good evening and Ilana organised lots of games and things to do.

After an unplanned long drive home and getting to bed quite late (2:30) I was looking forward to a nice long sleep only to be rudely awoken at 8am by the phone, and then became even more startled by a very enthusiast voice exclaiming, "hello! It's me! How are you?". Once I'd figured out who I am, where I was and that I was on the phone it came to me that it was RayVon from New Zealand. So we chatted and spent a great hour catching up before I had to make my excuses and get ready for Tamano. I rushed to leave at 10 to pick up Rachel at Takebe at 11 and with only one stop at a combini we were in Tamano for 1:15. Neil's Crazy Thanksgiving (unofficial title decided by me) was underway when we got there as 40 people cut, cliced, blended and mashed their way to a feast. A feast that could have fed maybe 100 people... Neil's planning was a little bit on the generous side, but it's always better to have too much than too little, and after gorging on a feast of festive food we were tidying and cleaning and making doggy bags to take away with us.

Rachel, Danielle and I headed back towards Tamano for Bob's fish and cocktail evening which became a fish and Kahlua evening as the planning went a bit awry and three bottles of Kahlua ended up on the table. But we did our best to battle through, and in ou nicest clothes we drank and talked, drank and played twister, drank and cycled to the combini in the dark and drank some more. You probably don't need me to tell you this, but cycling to combinis at night in unfimilar places on unfamiliar bikes that have no light is not a wise thing. As Bob, Adam, Betsy and I were soon to find out... Despite the fact that Adam and Betsy's bike (they were illegally sharing- ooh!) was the only one with a light, they were lagging behind me and Bob, much to our disadvantage as the streetlights became sparser and everything went black. As if inviting fate to stab me I declared in my best moany voice, "I don't like this". And followed it with a quick, "urgh!" as the front wheel slipped into a gully and threw me to the ground. On hearing my "urgh!", Bob shouted, "are you OK?" and followed it with an "urgh!" of his own as his front wheel went into the gully. And with the two of us on the floor laughing Adam and Betsy landed on the scene with a confused, "what the hell?". After a quick recovery we headed to Family Mart to discover that a) they had no Ichigo Daifuku and b) Bob had developed a Stigmata (but on his left hand only). The fall obviously brought him closer to God.

We returned to Bob's pleased with our purchases of choclit, crisps and other assorted snacks emblazened with slogans such as "good taste, good selection" which confirmed our feeling that we'd done a good job.

Sunday was a slow riser as everyone bar me and Betsy got up early. I kept waking up and falling asleep again as people did things around me and eventually the two of us rose at 10:30. After a pancake breakfast everyone headed to the onsen except for me who headed home. I sat indoors like a penny pinching pensioner with a blanket wrapped around me refusing to put the heater on and froze until I made my dinner of sashimi, followed by pasta with pumpkin, leek, mushrooms and a 600yen tuna steak fried in olive oil. Mmm. And then I decided to decorate my apartment for Christmas which now seems hugely appropriate as it snowed all night and is doing a similar blizzard-like thing right now outside the school windows...